Today’s most vital cultural forms are your identity, personality, and image. And in this new cultural paradigm, the artist’s performance of themself is often more important than the art they make. The persona is the message.

As art would no longer respond to itself, and no longer had any constraints, other human activities could be drawn from the world into its hungry maw. Art was no longer moving forward. Individual artists were free to consume the present, swallow other cultural forms, and twist them into new experiences.